Developing GEMS: an Environmental Modeling System

• Authors: Bernd Bruegge;Erik Riedel;Armistead G. Russell;Gregory J. McRae
• Venue: IEEE Computational Science & Engineering
• Year: 1995

Air quality regulations in the United States require thousands of planners and technicians in state and local agencies, and in corporations, to model various pollution scenarios. This is a first step towards devising optimal ways of limiting emissions to achieve statutory goals for protecting health. These end users are not necessarily computer experts or scientists: they need a sophisticated but ready-to-go computational system for simulating pollution and its control. The system must incorporate menus, mice, and the other features of readily understood GUIs for ease of use, but must also be able to take advantage of distributed data sets, high-bandwidth communication networks, and supercomputer power for state-of-the-art modeling. Many people need these tools and they are all trying to follow similar laws and rules, implying that, while flexibility is needed, a somewhat standardized system is in order so that apples can be compared with apples.While consumer and business software has advanced in ease of use by leaps and bounds over the last decade, the interfaces for many scientific and engineering applications are still stuck in the pregraphical, user-unfriendly age. Moreover, tools for organizing the proliferating input and output data that go along with these applications are often most diplomatically described as quaint. GEMS, the Geographic Environmental Modeling System, is part of an effort to turn that tide. GEMS itself is not a computational model for predicting air pollution but rather an object-oriented working environment with a graphical interface, designed to make the scientific models easier to use. Software engineers initiated GEMS, but quickly realized that to not only design the system right but to design the right system, end users had to be integrally involved at every stage. The authors, two software experts and two noted pollution modeling experts, have something to teach anyone who wants to develop a computational system for science and engineering.The authors can be reached in care of Bernd Bruegge, Carnegie Mellon Univ., School of Computer Science, WeH 3206, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, e-mail [e-mail]. E-mail addresses for the other authors are [e-mail], [e-mail], and [e-mail].